The road to hellish Customer Experience is paved with careless implementations of technology

I am blessed with very good health and have no medical conditions to the best of my knowledge, but my wife insisted that it is time for a complete medical exam. She even supplied me with a link to setup my appointment online. Within 3 seconds after I opened a web form to see the availability of the doctor I wanted to visit, a pop-out survey blocked my view asking me to rate my experience using this scheduling service. Such pestering became so common that I don’t get irritated anymore when facing it. At least you can just refuse to “play” and continue most of the time. I just don’t understand why a company wants to “invest” in annoying their customers – after all it is not difficult to figure out this user of their “service” could not possibly rate his experience since he did not have one yet.

After selecting an available date and entering requested data into the two following forms, the service prompted me to click on a “Book the Appointment” button that followed by a message with apologies for not being able to book it and the phone number to call for help. It turns out the number was for technical support of the booking system. The support was neither technical nor supportive. They were not interested nor capable to help me book the appointment. The best they could do was to give the doctor’s office number to call.

It turned out the number was not for the doctor’s office, but for the “health program provider” charged with a duty to book appointments for a group of doctors. The person on the other end asked me for the same information I entered on the their web site, but before we concluded the process our call was interrupted. Imagine my “delight” when I heard an automated message cheerfully asking me to rate my experience. I had to hang up and call again to connect with another person who wanted me to start this process from the beginning. At this point I felt that this experience is destined to raise my blood pressure and the best thing to do for my health is to avoid this medical establishment at any cost.

This type of moronic implementations of technology is not limited to medical or government institutions. After all they have designed any accountability for their performance out off their “business” model a long time ago. I am not sure why they even waste money on the charade of “patient experience” or “citizen experience”.

Much more intriguing is how wide spread such examples of technology implementations are among honest business, large and small. Even the companies that advertise themselves as providers of customer engagement technologies for others are not immune to this disease of carelessness.

Change does not start with technology. It starts with realization that you have to change. In the case of the experience you deliver to your customers, you have to realize that the current level is not sustainable. You don’t have to care about your customers-you have to care about your ability to keep them. That realization leads to:
• a sincere attempt to walk a mile in the customer’s shoes and to look at your company through their eyes
• re-design of existing engagement processes from the outside-in perspective
• Acquire a technology to implement these processes to scale them for consistent delivery across the company

The careless implementation of customer engagement technologies amplifies the clear signal that the company does not really care about its customers and uses the customer experience buzzwords to cut their operating costs. Just like they did when they sold CRM “solutions”. It did work then. Now it may not work anymore because today a business is not about cost reduction. Today your customers can easily determine which vendors walk the customer experience walk, leaving those who just talk it, behind.

The way you engage your customers speaks so loud, they can’t hear your marketing messages.